Change is the process by which the future invades
our lives~~Alvin Toffler, "Future
Shock"

Each time it appears that
Republicans can't get any nastier, any more bereft of morality, they
wrap themselves in the flag, grab their guns and Bibles, and manage
once again to hit the bottom of the ethical barrel. A good example is
Ben Smith's recent startling
revelation in Politico.com, which exposed the dirty tricks
Republican National Committee (RNC) operatives were planning to play,
not only on Democrats in the upcoming elections -- but on their own
donors. Smith writes...

"Manipulating
donors with crude caricatures and playing on their fears is hardly
unique to Republicans or to the RNC -- Democrats raised millions off
George W. Bush in similar terms -- but rarely is it practiced in such
cartoonish terms.

"One page, headed "The Evil Empire," pictures
Obama as the Joker from Batman, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and
Senate Majority Leaders Harry Reid are depicted as Cruella DeVille and
Scooby Doo, respectively."

Ruh-Roh.
I can't help it -- that's good for a grin, albeit a ghoulish one. And
the "tchochkes," or swag, such as T-shirts, tote bags, baseball caps,
and other useless crap they planned to give to their donors in exchange
for big bucks made some of us laugh out loud.

But that's just
the funny part. The far more frightening aspect is the lengths the rabid
radical right -- not just the Republican Party -- is willing to go in
order to destroy President Obama and the "socialist commies" who elected
him. They are very open about it; proud to be the "Party of No," and
brag about burying Obama under a burning health-care pyre. Nearly a year
ago, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint gloated -- "this health-care
issue is D-Day for freedom in America...If we're able to stop Obama on
this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

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Former
Bush speech writer David Frum admitted to MSNBC's Ed Shultz on his
March 18 show that negotiation has never been on the Republican's
health-care table. Frum said...

"It's
critical for everybody, and not just the president. It's critical for
us on the Republican side, too. If this thing passes, there is going to
be an accountability moment on the Republican side. We had a choice, do
we negotiate and try to get some of our values in the bill? Or do we go
for total defeat of the president and bet everything on that?

"I
was one of those who said negotiate. That advice was rejected. We went
for total defeat of the president. If he prevails, it is going to be a
shutout of Republican views in one of the most important pieces of
legislation ever passed in the United States."

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Some
are disillusioned with Obama because they feel he has not been
forthcoming with his promise of change. They do not seem to realize
that, for more than a decade, change in this nation has been
overwhelming. Since the Kafkaesque mutation of the Republican
establishment, whose metamorphosis into a destructive force was sudden
as a result of five right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court
stopping the Florida recount in December 2000 and handing the
presidency to one of their own even though his opponent won the national
popular vote by more than a half million ballots, the change within
the Republican party has been nothing less than frenetic.

This is no longer about politics, where opposing sides
butt heads, twist arms and kick ass until they manage to agree on
legislation that will benefit American citizens on both sides of the
aisle. It is not, as Frum said, about merely defeating this president.
It is about destroying him; about weaving a noose for him out
of lies and dirty tricks; about sending a message to future generations
of African Americans that the "White" House means just that.

If
you doubt that the right-wing crusade is about race, you are either so
oblivious of the past that you see nothing unusual about the present --
or you haven't been to a Tea Party lately. At Tea Parties across the
nation, Obama is not only portrayed in hideous caricatures as the Joker,
but as others such as Adolph Hitler, Karl Marx and Osama bin Laden.

Initially,
the Tea Party movement was started by Congressman Ron Paul to appeal to
Americans who were frustrated and fed-up with such things as taxes and
wars, but it was immediately co-opted by right-wing think tanks and by
Fox News whose target-eyed pundits brayed 24/7 about a massive "white
culture" crusade taking over the nation. Racist hatemongers joined the
party, especially Rush
Limbaugh and Glenn
Beck and,in no time at all, had David
Duke, a "white nationalist" and former Grand Wizard of the Knights
of the Ku Klux Klan,looking like a rank amateur.

These guys
aren't crazy -- okay, maybe they are -- but they know exactly what
they're doing. They learned from eight years of K-K-Karl Rove and Dick
Cheney that fear and hate are the two easiest emotions to work with.
Stir in a generous helping of rage, and entire cultures can be
manipulated into a frenzy. And, when those emotions feed on racism, a
gathering can be turned into a mob, which can then be whipped into a
destructive, extremist riot.

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In the
Spring 2010 Intelligence Report published by the Southern Poverty Law
Center (SPLC), Mark Potok examines
the "Rage on the Right." He writes...

"Since
the installation of Barack Obama, right-wing extremists have murdered
six law enforcement officers. Racist
skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to
assassinate the nation's first black president. One man from Brockton,
Mass. -- who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites
that a genocide was under way against whites -- is charged with
murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as
possible on the day after Obama's inauguration. Most recently, a rash of
individuals with anti-government, survivalist or racist views have been
arrested in a series of bomb cases.

"As the
movement has exploded, so has the reach of its ideas, aided and abetted
by commentators and politicians in the ostensible mainstream. While in
the 1990s, the movement got good reviews from a few lawmakers and
talk-radio hosts, some of its central ideas today are being plugged by
people with far larger audiences like FOX News' Glenn Beck and U.S. Rep.
Michele Bachmann (R-Minn). Beck, for instance, re-popularized a key
Patriot conspiracy theory -- the charge that FEMA is secretly running
concentration camps -- before finally "debunking" it.